After a Hard Youth, Mom Found Beauty in Making Art
“Here’s proof that it’s never too late for dreams to be realized.”
Candy Schulman recalls how her mother, a self-educated traditional 1950s housewife, “discovered her true talent in her 60s, leaving behind a permanent vision for the next two generations.”
At an extraordinary Olympics, acts of kindness abound
The only Olympic sport I truly enjoy watching is swimming. Other than that, more than the medal counts I care about the kindness counts:
A surfer jumping in to translate for the rival who’d just beaten him. High-jumping friends agreeing to share a gold medal rather than move to a tiebreaker. Two runners falling in a tangle of legs, then helping each other to the finish line.
The Surprising Benefits of Talking to Strangers
In the past decade and a half, professors have begun to wonder if interacting with strangers could be good for us too: not as a replacement for close relationships, but as a complement to them. The results of that research have been striking. Again and again, studies have shown that talking with strangers can make us happier, more connected to our communities, me
My Phone Doesn’t Realize My Mother Is Dead
Karolina Waclawiak expresses an understandable ambivalence over the painful memories and emotions that her phone’s algorithms churn up when they bring up her past photos. Waclawiak’s thoughts move beyond the case of her mother’s death to incorporate all the jumbled emotions we all felt over the past 18 months or so.
Who Invented the Pencil?
Here’s the answer to a question I didn’t know I needed answered until I saw this article: “According to NPR, a Swiss naturalist named Conrad Gessner created the first depiction of a pencil in 1565.”
‘Grandmother, Where’d You Get So Smart?’ ‘Living, Baby. Living.’
“A woman with little formal education taught her granddaughter an important lesson.”
Mandy Shunnarah marvels over how quickly and confidently her grandmother from rural Alabama, without a college education, continued throughout her life to conquer the daily newspaper’s crossword puzzles.
Nervous about getting back out there and making new friends? Here are some tips
The pandemic not only kept us from interacting with family and friends; it downright made us afraid to do so. Now that our world is beginning to open up once again, “how do you overcome these anxieties, get back out there and make new friends?”
Madalyn Amato, an intern at the Los Angeles Times, consulted some experts and offers their advice.
© 2021 by Mary Daniels Brown
Retreading for Retirement 